The real meaning of free software

Here's the oigin of the activist version of free software; once you hear the story, the importance of the movement becomes very clear. In my view this story should be told more.

the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT had received an elegant new printer from Xerox. The printer, however, had an unfortunate tendency to jam, causing print jobs to pile up and nothing to get printed until someone happened to notice and fix the jam.

For Richard Stallman, one of the programmers at the AI Lab, this wasn’t such a big deal. With their previous printer, Stallman had simply changed the printer driver to detect whether the printer was jammed and, if it was, to notify anyone who had sent it a print job.

“If you got that message, you couldn’t assume somebody else would fix it,” Stallman later recalled. “You had to go to the printer. A minute or two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who got messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or three people, one of them, at least, would usually know how to fix the problem.” (Free as in Freedom, ch. 1)

But the Xerox printer was different: Xerox hadn’t provided the lab with the source code to their printer drivers. There was no way for Stallman to add this new functionality to the driver. When Stallman asked Xerox for the code, they refused to provide it, insisting that it was an important trade secret for their business. And when Stallman found a student at Carnegie Mellon who had been given access to the software, that student also refused to provide a copy, saying he’d signed a contract with Xerox not to share it.

Stallman was outraged. Computer software was supposed to be a tool to serve people; that’s why he and his labmates spent their time writing software. And yet, through a combination of greed and legal restrictions, people were forced to suffer because they were prevented from improving these tools.

The site this links back to is worth checking out as it seems to be some opening discussions about the way that our data can be kept relatively secure and personal in an age of web2.0 apps.

Sophie 1.0

I haven't tested this myself, but the tutorials look encouraging and I'm downloading it with a view to installing and using it to produce some multimedia online learning materials. It's free and seems targetting at academic usage, so it's the business from that point of view. Sophie 1.0 Available Now | Sophie: "Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins." There are a bunch of tutorials here.

Free stock images

It appears to do what it says on the tin and they don't look too bad either (shades of previous experiences impinge). However, there is no apparent search facility. I have found these helpful on other sites like retrievr (searching by sketch) or images.com which has a word searchable facility.
FREE STOCK IMAGES

Support ogg not MP3

"The use of MP3 is restricted by patents, while Ogg Vorbis is not. Unlike MP3, there are never any licensing costs for using Ogg Vorbis, and you do not have to worry about anyone suing you for using it without a license. You might have heard about Microsoft's recent loss in a $1.5 billion suit over their use of MP3. These patent lawsuits might never affect you directly, but they create a culture where creative and skilled individuals cannot develop multimedia software without fear of being legally attacked. Using Ogg is one way to support them in their efforts and to encourage a better culture."
FSF - Getting started with Ogg and installing Ogg plugins: